My friend and TAC contributor Michael Warren Davis (above, looking gloriously reactionary) e-mailed a response to the Gen Z reader’s letter saying that if she could plug in to the Experience Machine, she would. He gives me permission to share it with you:
I’m two years older than your friend. And I think I’m doing pretty well for myself. My dad worked for a prison, and was raised by a single mother. I have no college degree. But now I’m married with three kids, making a good income, renting an apartment, and hoping to buy a house when the market recovers.
I will rage against the Boomer machine until the cows come home. Yes, our generation(s) are getting screwed. Absolutely. But something in your friend’s letter leapt out from the page: “I’m also a pretty addicted internet user, a video game enthusiast, and even my creative practices (writing and digital painting) are done, well, on a computer.”
She’s self-aware enough to admit that being addicted to the internet makes her more willing to be plugged into the Experience Machine. But the web is the Experience Machine. It’s just a prototype, but it’s getting more advanced by the day. I’m going to call it the Experience Machine Beta Version.
I don’t think anyone has yet grasped how this corrupts our cognitive functions, because my generation is the first to grow up with constant access to internet technology. You wouldn’t believe how many of my childhood memories are of video games. And I had a great childhood—lots of time with family, big house in the woods, plenty of friends, part-time job on a farm, etc. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I really did grow up “rich in experience.” My goodness, though. I reminisce about characters from Age of Mythology more than I do my childhood friends. I remember “visiting” planets from the Jedi Knight series more vividly and more fondly than I do our family vacations.
Why? Well, it’s obvious. This online realm is more exciting, especially for a kid. Being an Atlantean admiral, fighting minotaurs and frost giants, is way cooler than being a sixth-grader. Trying to outrun swoopbike gangs on Zonju V and mutant rancors on Tanaab make a deeper psychological impression than looking at statues with your mom and grandfather.
So, it’s not that we cannot distinguish between reality and the internet. It’s that—in terms of the impressions that the internet makes on our brains—the internet is in many ways more real. And I don’t believe Millennials/Zoomers can have any perspective on this until we pry ourselves out of the EMBV.
To use just one example, your friend writes: “Gen Z is Nihilism personified… but they grew up with the ‘Work As Virtue’ or, if you want, ‘Capitalism As Virtue’.”
Look, my wife is Gen Z, as are most of our friends. I don’t know a single person to whom this applies. I’ve never met anyone whose lived experience is remotely like this. I don’t even know many people my age who place a high premium on hard work—far too few to believe this idea Gen Z has: that their homes and schools were basically Taylorist reeducation centers.
Look at the chart I’ve attached, from Liberal Washington Post. [Note: The chart failed to attach; I’ll add it in when MWD sends it — RD] Zoomers have the least work experience of any American generation by far. It’s very common to hear them complain that their whole lives are consumed by work, but this is true of 35% of Gen Z at most—assuming 100% job dissatisfaction.
So, where does this come from? The internet.
I agree with everything else Gen Z says about work. Boomers are hoarding too much property, wealth, and jobs. The quality of work available to young people is depressing. Our economic outlook is pretty bleak. But in my experience, the huge majority of young people’s suffering is self-inflicted through the internet. As we all know, screentime is anxiety-induing by its nature. Social media now glamorizes mental illness, too, meaning you’re incentivized to lean into the damaging effects of internet addiction. But then you’ve also got these poor Zoomers taking their shitty retail jobs and turning them into a whole worldview, to the point where this intelligent young friend of yours thinks she basically lives in a Dickensian dystopia.
This is what young people do. Everything has to be a narrative, an archetype, an ideology. Their shitty retail job isn’t just a shitty retail job: it’s a microcosm through which they view the whole world. And, let’s be honest, they’re not busting their asses. They take pride in doing as little as possible to earn profits for their corporate masters (slow quitting, or whatever it’s called). And I salute them! But even though fewer than half of Zoomers work—and far fewer work hard—they all talk as if they’re child workers in the Victorian Era. It’s a mass delusion they programmed into this open-source EMBV.
What’s more, they tell themselves they’ll never be able to do any better… and so they don’t. Meanwhile, the local Ruger factory cannot find workers in a highly depressed part of New Hampshire—and they’re offering $40k with full benefits. Tradesmen are desperate for apprentices who aren’t heroin addicts. My 18-year-old cousin is making forty at the ship yard as a trainee out of high school. True: there’s not a lot of opportunity. But most of the opportunity that does exist is being ignored.
As you know, I’m a declinist. But unfortunately declinism is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it’s unfortunate, not because I’m afraid of decline (“Nothing gold can stay”) but because it’s robbing young people of the real joy they might be able to find in life. They assume the satisfying experiences are beyond their reach IRL, and so they don’t strive for it. But it is within their reach. I think I’m living proof.
These folks are like Huxley, who wrote a prophetic book about how drugs will be used to stupefy the public and make them easier to control… only to die a drug addict himself. He helped to build the brave, new world. Sorry to say, I’m getting the same vibes from your friend.
Anyway. That’s why they’re not afraid of the Experience Machine. The question, “Would you plug yourself into the EM?” is meaningless, because we’ve spent our whole lives with one foot (and then some!) in the EMBV. Most of us cannot tell the difference between reality and Virtual Reality in the first place. We cannot distinguish experience from simulation. If anyone my age can, it’s because he or she is actively cultivating that ability through a kind of Luddism.
Seriously, though. “Touching grass” isn’t nearly enough. It’s a good start, but it’s as if someone’s clothes catch fire and you say, “Here, have a sip of my water.” We have no idea how bad things are on this front. It’s not that our sense of reality is warped; it’s that we have no sense of reality to begin with. I’ve struggled with this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be THE great crisis my generation has to face.
That’s why I push Luddism so hard. It’s not about “authenticity.” It’s about reality. And at this point, it’s not optional.
Here, by the way, is a link to Michael Warren Davis’ Substack, if you want to read more of his writing.
Can’t remember if I shared it with you, but I sent the first reader’s Experience Machine letter to my oldest son, who is of her generation (he’s 23), and asked him what he thought. He said she needs to unplug from the Internet and go outside and do something. He lived a lot of his life online when he was at home, but then when he went to college, my son got heavily involved in cycling, as well as in working at the college radio station, and teaching himself how to make art (printing techniques, etc.). His mental health improved drastically. He had been tense and easy to anger before. It was like night and day. He keeps telling me that if I spent less time online and more engaging with the real, tactile world, I wouldn’t be so doom-and-gloomy. I bet he’s right.